The Winery, the Armory, and the Troglodytes
I get a lot of DMs from people. Aside from comments about my “sultry Sunday jazz brunch voice” (their words, not mine, though I can already picture Denise shaking her head as she reads this), the most common questions fall into three buckets: how we got Sully here, why we chose the Loire Valley, and what our daily life is like.
But the questions that always surprise me are about the house. People want to know: what’s it like? Did we have to renovate? What style is it? They’re picturing Provençal farmhouses, half-timbered cottages, or maybe some grand château with turrets and sweeping staircases.
What they don’t picture is the truth: half of our home is tucked into a limestone hillside like a cork in a bottle. The kitchen and family room aren’t “cave-themed,” they are caves. Solid white stone walls that once held up wine presses, now holding up my cookware and a Wi-Fi mesh network.
They connect to what you might call a traditional house, if “traditional” means a limestone hallway cut through from the family room into a house whose western wall is literally the face of the hill. That wall now nobly does double duty, holding everything together while keeping the main house a steady 70 degrees even in the hottest stretch of summer.
And out in front of the house, lined up like eccentric relatives at a reunion, stretch six more caves; each with its own odd history of wine, war, animals, and troglodyte life.
Most people talk about their basements like they’re bragging about an appendix. “We finished the basement,” they say, or “we turned it into a man cave,” which usually means a flat-screen nailed to drywall above a refrigerator stocked with light beer and a dartboard that came free with a Columbia House subscription. Seven CDs for a penny and a lifetime of regret. It’s America boiled down to suburban dignity, a homestead of tasteful mediocrity where the proudest domestic achievement is hiding the vacuum behind a leather recliner. And we all know it’s there. That’s what makes it comfortable. Like Uncle Ray snoring through the Sunday football game.
We don’t have that. We don’t own a basement that could be shipped in a Costco pallet. We have caves, six of them. Dug straight into the limestone hill like contraband tunnels for romantics and smugglers, complete with tanks, bats, ancestral spiders, and the occasional WWII souvenir left behind with the same casual abandon as a forgotten umbrella.
In the Loire Valley, this isn’t eccentric. It’s real estate.
Every house near the river has a cave. Across the Cher in Bourré there’s one carved straight into the hillside — three full stories of troglodyte engineering, capped with a picture window on the top floor that looks out over the valley like it’s a château suite. Around here, “troglodyte” isn’t an insult, it’s an architectural style.
That’s the thing that gets me. Growing up, calling someone a troglodyte was a playground insult. Fred Flintstone. Neanderthal. The guy at work who still faxes things. It meant backward, primitive, stuck in the Stone Age. Here, being a troglodyte means you’re one mortgage payment ahead of the guy across the street. Troglodyte life is aspirational. It’s the Loire Valley version of beachfront property. The caves are cool in summer, warm in winter, quiet, and permanent. In America, living in a cave means you’ve lost the plot. In France, it means you won the lottery.
Here’s the kicker: what was once an insult really was the truth for a long time. Up until the early 20th century, half the damn valley lived in caves. It was not because it was chic or “eco-friendly,” it was because quarrying tuffeau limestone for castles and churches left big empty holes. Poor farmers needed roofs they didn’t have to buy, so they moved in. Families piled in with their goats, rabbits, and chamber pots.
By the 1950s, the government decided caves were too medieval, too drafty, too poor for modern France and hustled people into concrete houses with plumbing. The caves emptied out, left to bats, barrels, and memory. Now, of course, the wheel has turned again. Now, tourists pay extra for a cave wine tasting, Airbnbs advertise them as romantic getaways, and here we are, two Americans who spent decades above ground, happily burrowing back in.
Call us troglodytes, we’ll take it as a compliment. For me, it’s less about romance and heritage and more about not sweating through my shirt in a heatwave while EDF jacks the electricity bill.
But the caves here weren’t built to be quirky wine-cellar curiosities. They were workhorses. Before I ever set a pan against a limestone wall — yes, me, not Denise; the kitchen is my domain, she bakes, I make dinner — this property was a winery in the truest sense of the word: a communal co-op where growers pressed their grapes together.
Our family room still carries the ghosts of its first job. In the limestone walls are notches and circles, scars left from the arms of a massive wooden press. A contraption once turned by oxen, or by men who didn’t know the meaning of quit, until the juice bled out of the grapes. Those notches haven’t gone anywhere, they’re now the perfect landing spots for Denise’s latest brocante treasures. Not kitschy knickknacks, but pieces of real French history that seem like they were just waiting for their own hideaway — notches that had been waiting to be useful again.
The first floor of the main house wasn’t for people, it was for the horses and cattle. The workers lived upstairs, close enough to catch a whiff of the real residents who actually kept the place running. Cave Five was pigs. Cave Six was rabbits and whatever else squeaked, grunted, or laid eggs. And scrawled across the stone walls, in what is now our kitchen and garage, you can still read chalky notes of harvests, cattle counts, and names scratched in half-legible hands. A limestone yellow pad from the 1800s.
It’s humbling, standing there, realizing this place once housed cows, pigs, and barnyard chaos. Now it houses me, Sully, and Viggo. And depending on the day, I’m not sure the upgrade is all that dramatic. Surely the animals were more useful, but at least I clean up after myself.
The place worked right up until the war, then fell quiet. The tanks went dry, the animals disappeared, and the caves became hiding spots: for barrels and, I suspect, for people who needed to stay unseen. Not exactly a Zillow feature, but it got the job done.
Cave Four we call the Winery. It’s lined with four massive fermentation tanks, state-of-the-art at the end of the 19th century and silent since World War II. These aren’t the rustic barrels you picture in glossy wine magazines. These are industrial giants, concrete and limestone chambers with red iron hatches, built to churn out gallons of Sauvignon and Côt back when France was racing to modernize wine. The walls are streaked with a century of ghosts: tartrate crystals, wine stains, residue from vintages forgotten before anyone alive today could legally drink.
The cave itself stretches back nearly a hundred feet. When our dear friends Maria and Randy visited from Southern California. Randy, who made breathtaking old vine Zinfandel on Dry Creek Road in Healdsburg, and Maria, magnificent Maria, who has been my loudest advocate to finally write all this down — they both stood in Cave Four slack-jawed. Randy just shook his head at the tanks. He and Maria said what D had been secretly thinking: turn this into the ultimate tasting room.
And they are right. It’s not just a cave. It’s a story waiting for a corkscrew.
I stand in that cave and my American brain does what it always does: how do we bring this thing back to life?
My neighbor, noted winemaker Vincent Roussely, a mad scientist of Sauvignon and whimsy. He is already aging wine in amphora because barrels and cement tanks apparently weren’t weird enough. Why not add “resurrected 19th-century tanks abandoned since Hitler marched across the Cher” to his repertoire? I keep dangling the idea in front of him like a fishing line: come on, Vincent, imagine the marketing. Cuvée Cave Quatre, fermented where the Germans never set foot. Tourists would lose their minds.
Vincent just looks at me the way he always does. The look that says: The American.
Maybe winemaking isn’t what I’m built for. Let’s talk about Cave Three, "The Armory". A couple months back we were scavenging for extra wood when I opened a cigar box on one of the shelves. What I found tucked in like someone had absent-mindedly left a keychain photo viewer, the real tourist-trap gold: mini View-Masters for people who couldn’t be trusted with more than one picture. Only this wasn’t kitsch. It was a grenade and a German flare gun.
I yelled, “D! Come check this out!”
In America, this is a ten-part Netflix docuseries: the sheriff shows up, they rope off the property, bomb-disposal robots crawl down the stairs, and Wolf Blitzer is reporting live from the lawn. Here in France? The mayor shrugs, pours another glass of local Sauvignon, and tells you which neighbor’s uncle was in the Resistance. Different continents, different customer-service policies.
It’s kind of absurd, living in a place like this. One moment I’m grilling sausages in the garage, yes, the garage, don’t ask…the next I’m wondering if the grenade in the armory is still live. One moment I’m watching Netflix in a cave, the next I’m running my hand across a wall that hasn’t seen wine since Edith Piaf was on the radio. And through it all, I’m reminded: this is normal here.
Everyone’s a troglodyte. That’s the part that keeps getting me. What was once a schoolyard insult is now my reality. We eat dinner in caves, we drink wine stored in caves, we wave to neighbors who also live in caves. You’re not an outsider for being a troglodyte here, you’re just part of the valley.
These caves sat vacant after the war. Silent. Waiting. Until 1996, when a family from Paris decided it would make a perfectly good summer home. They added electricity, slapped primer on the walls, and called it a day. Voilà — rustic chic.
Four miles downriver at Chenonceau, the château straddled the Cher like a cartoon drawing of France’s divided soul. Half the castle sat in occupied territory, the other half in free France. People crossed through it like it was the world’s most elegant underground railroad: Jews, downed pilots, Resistance fighters slipping through ballrooms under the noses of German officers. Meanwhile, up the road, my future family room was growing moss, and Cave Three was quietly stockpiling munitions.
When we found this place, D knew it would be the ultimate blank canvas for her dream of a French farmhouse. Blank canvas indeed. But somehow, that was the tonic our souls needed.
Sometimes I wonder what the old owners would think if they came back. They’d see me standing in Cave Four, imagining Sauvignon and Côt bubbling again, and they’d probably nod. They’d see me in Cave Three, holding a flare gun like it was Indiana Jones cosplay, and they’d probably shake their heads. But then they’d step into the kitchen — my kitchen — where I’m cooking my heart out in a limestone chamber while the dogs sprawl on the cool rock, and they’d recognize it immediately: troglodyte life, just updated with better cookware and fiber internet.
People think France is all elegance, all sophistication. The truth is messier and funnier. Sometimes it’s rosé in the garden. Sometimes it’s finding Nazi souvenirs in your basement. Sometimes it’s Netflix in a cave.
Sometimes it’s a neighbor telling you with a straight face that your grenade is probably fine. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, it’s all of those things in the same week.
So yes, I’ll say it proudly: we’re troglodytes now. Not the knuckle-dragging kind, not Fred Flintstone’s bowling buddy. The Loire Valley kind. The caves are our home, our history, our chaos. And like everything else in this adventure, it’s worth savoring.
A Quick Note
Been pandering the book everywhere. Getting lots of traction. Thanks so much to everyone for supporting it. Next newsletter, I promise I will get back to sharing awesome places in France to visit. We will also start digging back into the quirky things that make this place crazy fun.
Until next time.
Thanks for subscribing and thanks for reading.
Paul
P.S. Yes, I’m shamelessly plugging my book again. Get Frenched is part guide, part comedy of errors, and all true. It’s at WeGotFrenched.com. If you haven't done so yet, please do.
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